I've not tried hooking up an external to my Denon, but isn't that what the pre-outs do? once you hook a speaker up to the pre-out, you have bypassed the amp for that particular channel while leaving the amp working on the other channels?

Edited by Adrian (02/07/1005:56 PM)

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Half of communication is listening. You can't listen with your mouth.

Unless its got some little loops in the back like Ive seen on old Yamaha amps then the receivers amp will still be running, but given that its got no load its not going to contribute much noise or load to the rest of the system. Don't worry about it.

You can't bi-amp the same signal. As soon as you use the preout for a particular speaker on the receiver you can't hook up the same speaker to the receiver output for that speaker. I guess I should let Let John K answer this.